One of the best things I've read about evolution and the second law of thermodynamics is an essay called "Thermodynamics and Evolution" by John W. Patterson in Scientists Confront Creationism, edited by Laurie R. Godfrey.
Briefly, a prominent creationist named Henry Morris argued that the second law of thermodynamics means that evolution is impossible. (Patterson shows that Morris did not actually come up with this argument; among other things, R. E. D. Clark and E. H. Betts anticipated the argument. But, Patterson notes, Morris made the argument popular in a book called The Genesis Flood and in his subsequent writing.)
Patterson offers useful analogies that highlight the distinction between local and global increases in entropy. The second law requires that global entropy increases as a result of any thermodynamic process, but not that the entropy of any particular object or system increase. In fact, common processes like metabolism do produce decreases of entropy in some places (inside the body) while producing increases of entropy elsewhere (like in the body's waste products and in the waste heat the body releases into the environment). Patterson cites a discussion from a 1978 textbook by Ira N. Levine in support of this description of what the body does; Levine specifically attacks the notion that "life processes violate the second law", which Patterson thinks is a necessary (if inconvenient) consequence of creationist reasoning about the second law.
One example Patterson does not use is a computer. Anyone who has been in the market for a computer power supply, or who has used a recent laptop, will be aware that modern computers consume a lot of power and generate a lot of waste heat. (They also generate thermal noise and a great deal of waste electromagnetic radiation -- not all of which is quite as disordered as we might wish, given that sometimes useful information about the internal state of the computer or the computer's display can be recovered from it!)
One reason that computers do consume so much power and generate so much waste heat is precisely that they are constantly producing extremely low entropy within their internal circuitry. The state of the computer's processing circuits is highly ordered and remains so over a long period of time even as external inputs are applied to them. (There are actually some rules about how much power must be consumed -- as a matter of physical necessity -- in order to perform certain computations accurately. These rules are derived in the thermodynamics of computation, something I don't understand very well, but a field that's been developed very extensively since the 1970s. Actual computers consume a lot more power than they theoretically would need to, but actual engines are less efficient than an ideal heat engine, too, so it's no surprise that we can't build machines at the ideal of thermodynamic efficiency.)
But a computer is an increasingly familiar machine that generates a huge amount of entropy immediately outside itself (at its exhaust vents) in the process of producing an extremely low entropy within itself. So is a metabolizing organism -- an example Patterson does present. Many people using recent computers are also aware that computers behave erratically when their heat sinks or other cooling systems fail; in that case, they can't move their waste heat outside to dissipate it into the environment, and indeed, their internal entropy increases beyond appropriate engineering tolerances, and they begin to make errors. It is also true that an organism that can't dissipate waste heat effectively is likely to suffer illness as a result of an unreasonably high internal temperature. We need to rely on the outside environment as a kind of enormous heat sink into which we constantly dump entropy. If we couldn't do that, we would die.
Once we have done this, other organisms -- using an external energy source and producing their own waste products -- organize some of our waste products into a useful form again. As lots of people know, this activity couldn't continue without an immense and constant energy input from the sun. Within the sun's power, individual organisms couldn't get the energy they need to keep organizing themselves and to keep disorder out. (I realize that the thermodynamics here are more complicated than what I have described.)
One oddity is that Henry Morris seems to recognize the concept that an open thermodynamic system may experience a decrease in entropy -- but he introduces a spurious requirement that the system "must also contain a 'program' to direct" that decrease. Many people answer Morris by talking about the difference between closed and open systems, but Morris seems to try to add an additional criterion of the "program".
In the case of the computer, for instance, the "program" must consist in the layout of the circuitry, for presumably applying wall current directly to any random circuit has a decent chance of increasing its entropy. And in the case of the body, the "program" must consist in those structures that enable metabolic processes to take place.
Since Patterson does not address Morris's concept of a "program", some people may conclude that Patterson has not actually rebutted Morris. After all, Patterson stresses the open system/closed system distinction, but Frank Steiger notes that Morris -- at least in his The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth -- has added a "program" criterion. But as Steiger observes, thermodynamics does not actually contain such a criterion, and it is definitely not a part of the second law, which limits itself to a conclusion about the total entropy in the universe or in some other closed system.
If there were such a thing as Morris's "program" principle, it would have to come from somewhere other than the second law of thermodynamics. Patterson, for example, describes a machine called a hydraulic ram pump, which "can get low-lying water to pump part o itself uphill" -- an example of "an uphill or backward process [that] can spontaneously occur in nature by being [...] coupled to a more dominant downhill process [in such a way that] the downhill process can actually drive the other process 'backward' or in the so-called uphill direction". This means that, in the presence of a hydraulic ram with no external power source, a portion of a stream of water flowing downhill can provide the means of making another portion of the stream flow uphill. Presumably, if Morris tried to answer this, he would argue that the hydraulic ram is an instance of a "program" and that the hydraulic ram itself could not arise by chance, which is to say spontaneously.
Steiger calls that "misleading" and "arbitrar[y]" because many systems do exhibit behavior that is analogous to the behavior of the hydraulic ram. (Steiger doesn't actually discuss the hydraulic ram example; instead, he uses an example shared with Patterson: the formation of extraordinarily highly ordered snowflakes spontaneously in the atmosphere. It's Morris's program criterion that Steiger sees as "misleading" and "arbitrar[y]" because it isn't actually a principle of physics but simply a way of speaking that can easily lead to incorrect intuitions about which processes are actually possible.)
Patterson's discussion of coupling one process to another -- as in the case of the hydraulic ram -- is extremely illuminating. It reminds me of a remarkable quotation from Tommaso Toffoli, which is given in several different forms.
In a sense, nature has been continually computing the "next state" of the universe for billions of years; all we have to do -- and, actually, all we can do -- is "hitch a ride" on this huge, ongoing Great Computation.
or
We never perform a computation ourselves, we just hitch a ride on the great Computation that is going on already.
In a similar sense, we might say that, in order to do anything at all, we just hitch a ride on the entropy flows that are already going on around us; we couple things we care about to them, so that the mighty flow of increasing entropy will momentarily help decrease the entropy within us and ours.
You can read the MGM v. Grokster certiorari order in the Supreme Court's order list for Friday, December 10. It's only one sentence, but what a sentence.
So, for the first time, an EFF case is going to the Supreme Court. I could also say that, for the first time, a case I've worked on is going to the Supreme Court.
Some people asked me what "certiorari" means. It is the passive infinitive of the Latin verb certioro, certiorare. (I had wrongly believed that the verb was deponent until I looked it up in Lewis and Short just now.) Certioro means "to inform, apprise, show", according to Lewis and Short, which means that "certiorari" means "to be informed, to be apprised, to have shown to one". Some people suggest it means "to learn more", which seems like a reasonable paraphrase.
Although there are many kinds of writs that the U.S. Supreme Court can issue, an appeal that is not "as of right" (that is, an appeal that the Court has discretion to decide whether to accept) is now normally taken by asking the Court to issue a writ of certiorari. (There are infrequent appeals as of right to the Supreme Court; one example is when Congress specifically creates an expedited review process for a law such as the Communications Decency Act or the Children's Internet Protection Act. This is why Supreme Court decisions about those laws show "On Appeal from" some lower court in the caption, instead of the much more typical "On Writ of Certiorari to" some lower court. In the past, for reasons I don't understand, it was much more common to see "On Writ of Error" in discretionary reviews.)
Taking "certiorari" as "to learn more", asking the Court for a writ of certiorari means asking the Court to choose to learn more about a particular case. And so, when the Court chooses to hear a discretionary appeal, it will issue a writ of certiorari to the lower court that originally made the decision under review. That writ essentially asks the lower court to send the Supreme Court more information about the history of the case and the decision, so that the Court may use that information to decide whether or not the lower court got it right. If the Supreme Court denies an appeal -- denies certiorari -- it is effectively saying that it does not care to learn more about that particular case at that time.
So granting certiorari in MGM v. Grokster essentially means that the Supreme Court is curious about that case and wants to learn more about it. By convention, that curiosity extends to deciding whether the lower court (in this case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) decided the case correctly. In very unusual situations, the Supreme Court does not follow that convention; it begins to learn more about a case and then decides the case is not actually interesting or important enough. In that case, the writ of certiorari will be dismissed and the Supreme Court will not decide the case after all. You can find examples of this by doing a Google search for the magic phrase "the writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted". Sometimes the Court will say why certiorari was improvidently granted, and other times it's a complete mystery. One case where the writ of certiorari was dismissed late in the game (after argument) was Kasky v. Nike, the case about whether Nike could be prosecuted for false advertising after it made claims that its labor practices were good when apparently they were actually bad.
Now maybe someone is curious about what a deponent verb is. A deponent verb is a verb that is "passive in form, but active in meaning"; etymologically, it has "dropped" or "lost" or "given up" its active forms. This probably doesn't make any sense for people who don't know an inflected language. Latin has a number of verbs like this, and until today, I had wrongly thought that "certiorari" was one of them.
By the way, "certioro" is closely related to "certus", which is related to the English word "certain", or, maybe more usefully, "ascertain". It might be based to say that the Supreme Court chooses what kinds of things it is going to ascertain.
Eugene Volokh, whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time this past week, has written a huge article on "Crime-Facilitating Speech". It's characteristically comprehensive, full of fascinating examples and discussions of real cases, and right in the middle of an area of huge interest to me. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet.
One area where first amendment law has run into difficulty -- and I bear in mind that some people have argued that we can never hope to resolve these difficulties -- is when speech can be useful to people committing some sort of crime. Volokh gives many dozens of examples. That speech is then a magnet for prospective regulation, especially when regulators believe it would be cheaper or easier to suppress the speech than to go after the crime it might facilitate, or when someone believes the crime is especially troubling. I note that, for example, Dean Marks and Bruce Turnbull made explicit their argument for censoring programmers in their infamous 1999 article on how they hoped to use the DMCA on the grounds that it was too expensive to pursue people who might abuse programmers' speech but relatively cheap to censor the programmers. Because there aren't a lot of programmers, you know, and other people are wholly in thrall to their leet skillz in order to be able to do stuff. Here's hoping that changes and that you take personal responsibility for helping undermine the premises Marks and Turnbull employ. But I digress.
One of the interesting parts parts of Volokh's paper is his discussion of the value of crime-facilitating speech. He describes various reasons why crime-facilitating speech might be useful to someone other than a criminal who wants to use it to help commit a crime. One of his examples is as part of an argument about what is possible -- and hence about policy or resource allocation. For example, Volokh mentions that information about how to make weapons might serve an argument that it is expensive or futile to try to suppress those weapons; the more specific the information, the greater the benefit to the argument may be. He gives a related example about information on marijuana cultivation -- to the extent that people learn that it is easy to cultivate marijuana, they may be less likely to believe that laws against marijuana can be enforced easily, and they might conclude that those laws are not such a good idea.
This is particularly interesting to me because I'm about to publish some information about aviation security -- arguably "crime-facilitating" information within the meaning of Volokh's definition -- in the service of an argument that current U.S. aviation security measures are both ineffective and harmful. And even as I think about aviation security, I remember dozens of casual conversations with friends where we started to speculate about just how ineffective airlines' and TSA's screening procedures are and just how easy it would be to defeat or undermine those. In my experience, whenever people start to talk about this, they invariably come up with half a dozen ways of concealing or improvising weapons that would very likely evade the screening process. This can be an interesting thought experiment, but it could also, especially if those ways began to be more widely publicized, form a part of a political argument.
There are at least three kinds of arguments that could benefit from publicizing details of, say, ways of improvising weapons that could evade TSA screening procedures. One argument is that TSA's screening procedures are inherently incapable of stopping attackers and could never reasonably be capable of doing so. Therefore, TSA's budget, power, or influence should be reduced, because TSA's current resources are being wasted. Another argument is that, because many attacks are currently possible and might conceivably be deterred by better screening, TSA's budget, power, or influence should be expanded to allow it to research or deploy new, more effective screening procedures that would make it significantly harder for people to conceal or improvise weapons.
The third argument is that TSA's screening procedures or rules about prohibited items are misdirected because they prohibit relatively harmless items while permitting relatively dangerous items. Therefore, the rules are irrational and should be significantly revamped. Under this argument, one might maintain that there are some screening procedures that could be useful, but they are significantly different from the current screening procedures. (Probably this argument implies that passengers ought to be permitted to carry items such as pocket knives, which were permitted in the past, on the grounds that weapons more dangerous than pocket knives can be improvised or manufactured from other things that are already permitted. However, this third argument does not imply that screening should be abolished or that every kind of item should be permitted. The argument seems to involve two assumptions: first, that every item has a degree of threat or danger associated with it; second, that it is inappropriate to forbid some item while permitting some other item that is more dangerous. Some people would probably agree with these assumptions, while other people would not, because they think about threats to aviation security differently -- perhaps believing that many potential attackers are not especially skilled or motivated.)
Despite Volokh observation that crime-facilitating speech can have these kinds of benefits (and to me, because I think so much of current aviation security is both ineffective and harmful, the potential benefits seem pretty significant), it's probably true that publishing lots of details about improvising weapons would make lots of people angry, and might make law enforcement concerned. Some of that anger might be a result of people seeking peace of mind instead of security (in the sense of an actually reduced likelihood of successful attacks -- think of Bruce Schneier's suggestion that much security, and especially much aviation security, is actually "security theater"). But some of that concern might be justified if it's really true that a lot of prospective attackers are not very skilled or motivated. Under that theory, maybe there are things that a moderately clever amateur could think up in a few minutes, but that some potential terrorist or enraged passenger would not have thought of but for the presence of lots of detailed articles about how to attack airline passengers. Schneier has, I think, mentioned glass and ceramic knives (they figure prominently in the plot of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash), and they could lead to an interesting debate: they don't set off metal detectors, they are sharper than metal knives, but few people know about them, few people own them, and few people carry them around regularly -- whereas many people own and regularly carry metal pocket knives. So ceramic knives and glass knives, as weapons, are something someone would have to obtain deliberately and in advance, whereas metal knives, as weapons, are something that might be widespread for casual reasons. Perhaps someone would say that this makes an important difference.
Volokh's paper goes far beyond these questions, and I think it's a fertile work that will prove important and influential. One thing I think it doesn't address in detail is the prior conceptual question of the problem of defining what kind of things are or can be crimes. For example, sometimes some kind of communicative activity is defined as a crime in itself (as opposed to merely facilitating some other crime, which is the situation Volokh's paper focuses on). Defamation, threats, and obscenity are examples (as is copyright infringement); in an earlier era, "seditious libel" was an example, and the Supreme Court has allowed a narrow but nonempty scope for viewing some kinds of seditious advocacy as crimes even today. Sometimes people make up entirely new categories of speech crime which were not understood as crimes by tradition -- circumvention device trafficking is our newest unhappy example. Sometimes people (including the Supreme Court) make a convenient pretense that certain things are "not speech" (like obscenity); in other cases they say that "nonspeech elements" of some expressive activity are being punished. As many people have recognized, there is a serious difficulty in the apparently logical distinction between speech and nonspeech elements -- say, in a rule like the O'Brien rule. If you make up a new crime, there is nothing in principle to stop you from banning any given speech by saying that you are merely punishing the "nonspeech elements" involved in the utterance of that speech so far as they run afoul of your entirely new kind of crime.
Some people feel that there is a coherent doctrine in O'Brien and other cases that deals with these questions by examining various things at various layers of regulation. I don't ind this very persuasive; I don't think U.S. free speech law is particularly coherent or particularly able to prevent new kinds of threats to speech or to explain exactly why existing speech restrictions are appropriate. And some people, like Stanley Fish, say that it is totally impossible to have any kind of theory that would actually be able to do that. I think I have gone on long enough that I won't try to summarize Fish's argument here. But it has some real power. Partly it relates to saying that the question of what things are expression and what things are not is an arbitrary political question, and that every expressive act has consequences for which one might conceivably hold someone responsible.
I think of myself as a free speech absolutist, but I have to admit that at present I don't know exactly what that might mean. Because there is a real problem about how we might say that it is ever possible to commit a crime solely by using words or another communications medium without also opening the door to the possibility of the political creation of new, additional categories of speech crime. I think Fish says that it is not possible.
One reason that I think that Eugene Volokh is a great teacher is that merely talking with him for a few minutes (totally apart from reading his papers!) is enough to rekindle one's sense that apparently simple free expression concepts are much more complicated that one might have suspected.
I went with Anirvan and friends to the
PowerPoint to the People competition at UC Berkeley on Wednesday. It was a pretty good time. This was a project, inspired partly by things like Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address PowerPoint presentation, in which artists competed to use PowerPoint in original, unusual, or entertaining ways.
Here's Charlie's discussion and the Wired News coverage of the event. The Wired News piece has a good discussion of the limitations of the competition entries, but it contains a particularly egregious error:
In Wednesday night's first piece, artists Greg Niemeyer and Monica Lam, with their piece "Single Origin" Outsourcing, lampooned what could have been a buttoned-down investment seminar or sales pitch by mixing Greek translations of The Lord's Prayer with carefully done slides that, on first glance, could well have been taken for genuine.
"Greek translations of The Lord's Prayer"? Um... Matthew 6:9-13, anybody?
This is exactly the same error that my high school alumni magazine made when it wrote about people singing "the Northfield Benediction, translated into Hebrew". (The Northfield Benediction is a musical setting by Lucy R. Meyer, a 19th-century alumna of my school, of the text "The Lord bless thee and keep thee, / The Lord make his face shine upon thee, / And be gracious unto thee, / The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, / And give thee peace.") The only trouble is that the Northfield Benediction is the King James Version's translation of Numbers 6:24-6, which was, of course, originally written in Hebrew, and which has been a part of Jewish liturgy for thousands of years. (It's called the birkat Kohanim or Priestly Blessing.)
Jewish prayers "translated into Hebrew"? Christian prayers in "Greek translation"? "And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"
... as David Byrne said even before he discovered PowerPoint.
Speaking of the Lord's Prayer, I think it was Nick who pointed out to me that it may be better to interpret the instruction at the beginning as "pray like this" -- in a simple, direct, informal way -- rather than "pray this prayer". The Greek is "outôs".
Nick is a very font of interesting and sometimes counterintuitive information about Christianity.
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